Conclave (17 page)

‘Adeyemi? A man who has more or less said that all homosexuals should be sent to prison in this world and to hell in the next? He is not the answer to anything!’

They reached the second floor. The candles flickering outside the
Holy Father’s apartment cast a red glow across the landing. The two most senior cardinals in the electoral college stood for a moment contemplating the sealed door.

‘What was going through his head in those final weeks, I wonder?’ Bellini said, almost to himself.

‘Don’t ask me. I didn’t see him at all for the last month.’

‘Ah, I wish you had! He was strange. Unreachable. Secretive. I believe he sensed his death was approaching and his mind was full of curious ideas. I feel his presence very strongly, don’t you?’

‘I do indeed. I still speak to him. I often sense he is watching us.’

‘I’m quite certain of it. Well, this is where we part. I am on the third floor.’ Bellini studied his key. ‘Room 301. I must be directly above the Holy Father. Perhaps his spirit radiates through the floor? That would explain why I am so restless. Be sure that you sleep well, Jacopo. Who knows where we’ll be this time tomorrow?’

And then, to Lomeli’s surprise, Bellini kissed him lightly on either cheek before turning away and continuing on up the staircase.

Lomeli called after him: ‘Goodnight.’

Without turning round, Bellini raised his hand in response.

After he had gone, Lomeli stood for another minute, staring at the closed door with its barrier of wax and ribbons. He was remembering his conversation with Benítez. Could it really be true that the Holy Father had known the Filipino well enough, and trusted him enough, to criticise his own Secretary of State? Yet the remark had the ring of authenticity. ‘Brilliant but neurotic’: he could almost hear the old man saying it.

Lomeli’s sleep that night was also restless. For the first time in many years he dreamt of his mother – a widow for forty years, who used
to complain that he was cold towards her – and when he woke in the early hours, her plaintive voice still seemed to be whining in his ears. But then, after a minute or two, he realised the voice he could hear was real. There
was
a woman nearby.

A woman?

He rolled on to his side and groped for his watch. It was almost 3 a.m.

The female voice came again: urgent, accusatory, almost hysterical. And then a deep male response: gentle, soothing, placatory.

Lomeli threw off his bedclothes and turned on the light. The unoiled springs of the iron bedstead creaked loudly as he put his feet to the floor. He tiptoed cautiously across the room and put his ear to the wall. The voices had fallen silent. He sensed that on the other side of the plasterboard partition they too were listening. For several minutes he held the same position, until he began to feel foolish. Surely his suspicions were absurd? But then he heard Adeyemi’s unmistakable voice – even the cardinal’s whispers had resonance – followed by the click of a door closing. He moved quickly to his own door and flung it open, just in time to see a flash of the blue uniform of the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul disappearing around the corner.

Later, it would be obvious to Lomeli what he should have done next. He should have dressed immediately and knocked on Adeyemi’s door. It might still have been possible, at that early moment, before positions were fixed and when the episode was undeniable, to have a frank conversation about what had just happened. Instead, the dean climbed back into his bed, drew the sheet up to his chin, and contemplated the possibilities.

The best explanation – that is to say, the least damaging from
his point of view – was that the nun was troubled, that she had concealed herself after the other sisters had left the building at midnight and had come to Adeyemi to seek guidance. Many of the nuns in the Casa Santa Marta were African, and it was entirely possible she had known the cardinal from his years in Nigeria. Obviously Adeyemi was guilty of a serious indiscretion in admitting her to his room unchaperoned in the middle of the night, but an indiscretion was not necessarily a sin. After that came a range of other explanations, from nearly all of which Lomeli’s imagination recoiled. In a literal sense, he had trained himself not to deal with such thoughts. A passage in Pope John XXIII’s
Journal of a Soul
had been his guiding text ever since his tormenting days and nights as a young priest:

This was the core of the hard mental discipline that had enabled Lomeli to remain celibate for more than sixty years.
Don’t even think about them!
The mere idea of going next door and talking man to man with Adeyemi about a woman was a concept that lay entirely outside the dean’s closed intellectual system. Therefore he resolved to forget about the whole incident. If Adeyemi chose to confide in him, naturally he would listen, in the spirit of a confessor. Otherwise he would act as if it had never happened.

He reached over and switched off the light.

AT 6.30 A.M.
, the bell rang for morning Mass.

Lomeli woke with an impending sense of doom somewhere at the back of his mind, as if his anxieties were all coiled together ready to spring out at him the moment he was fully awake. He went into the bathroom and tried to banish them with another scalding shower. But when he stood at the mirror to shave, they were still there, lurking behind him.

He dried himself and put on his robe, knelt at the prie-dieu and recited his rosary, then prayed for Christ’s wisdom and guidance throughout the trials that the day would bring. As he dressed, his fingers shook. He paused and told himself to be calm. There was a set prayer for every garment – cassock, cincture, rochet, mozzetta, zuchetta – and he recited them as he put on each item. ‘Protect me, O Lord, with the girdle of faith,’ he whispered as he knotted the cincture around his waist, ‘and extinguish the fire of lust so that chastity may abide in me, year after year.’ But he did so mechanically, with no more feeling than if he were giving out a telephone number.

Just before he left the room, he caught sight of himself in the mirror wearing his choir dress. The chasm between the figure he appeared to be and the man he knew he was had never seemed so wide.

He walked with a group of other cardinals down the stairs to the ground-floor chapel. It was housed in an annexe attached to the main building: an antiseptic modernist design with a vaulted ceiling of white wooden beams and glass, suspended above a cream and gold polished marble floor. The effect was too much like an airport lounge for Lomeli’s taste, yet the Holy Father, amazingly, had preferred it to the Pauline. One entire side consisted of thick plate glass, behind which ran the old Vatican wall, spotlit with potted shrubs at its base. It was impossible to see the sky from this angle, or even to tell whether it was yet dawn.

Two weeks earlier, Tremblay had come to see Lomeli and offered to take charge of celebrating the morning Masses in the Casa Santa Marta, and Lomeli, burdened with the prospect of the
Missa pro eligendo Romano Pontifice
, had been grateful to accept. Now he rather regretted it. He saw that he had given the Canadian the perfect opportunity to remind the Conclave of his skill at performing the liturgy. He sang well. He looked like a cleric in some Hollywood romantic movie: Spencer Tracy came to mind. His gestures were dramatic enough to suggest he was infused with the divine spirit, yet not so theatrical that they seemed false or egocentric. When Lomeli queued to receive Communion and knelt before the cardinal, the sacrilegious thought occurred to him that just this one service might have been worth three or four votes to the Canadian.

Adeyemi was the last to receive the host. He very carefully did not glance at Lomeli or anyone else as he returned to his seat. He seemed entirely self-possessed, grave, remote, aware. By lunchtime he would probably know whether he was likely to be Pope.

After the blessing, a few of the cardinals remained behind to pray, but most headed straight to the dining hall for breakfast. Adeyemi joined his usual table of African cardinals. Lomeli took a place between the archbishops of Hong Kong and Cebu. They tried to make polite conversation, but the silences soon became longer and more frequent, and when the others went up to collect their food from the buffet, Lomeli stayed where he was.

He watched the nuns as they moved between the tables serving coffee. To his shame, he realised he had never bothered to take any notice of them until now. Their average age, he guessed, was around fifty. They were of all races, but without exception short of stature, as if Sister Agnes had been determined not to recruit anyone taller than herself. Most wore spectacles. Everything about them – their blue habits and headdresses, their modest demeanour, their downcast eyes, their silence – might have been designed to efface them from notice, let alone prevent them becoming objects of desire. He presumed they were under orders not to speak: when one nun poured coffee for Adeyemi, he did not even turn to look at her. Yet the late Holy Father used to make a point of eating with a group of these sisters at least once a week – another manifestation of his humility that made the Curia mutter with disapproval.

Just before nine o’clock, Lomeli pushed away his untouched plate, rose and announced to the table that it was time to return to the Sistine Chapel. His move began a general exodus towards the lobby. O’Malley was already in position by the reception desk, clipboard in hand.

‘Good morning, Your Eminence.’

‘Good morning, Ray.’

‘Did Your Eminence sleep well?’

‘Perfectly, thank you. If it isn’t raining, I think I’ll walk.’

He waited while one of the Swiss Guards unlocked the door, and then stepped out into the daylight. The air was cool and damp. After the heat of the Casa Santa Marta, the slight breeze on his face was a tonic. A line of minibuses with their engines running coiled around the edge of the piazza, each watched by an individual plain-clothes security man. Lomeli’s departure on foot provoked a flurry of whispering into sleeves, and as he set off in the direction of the Vatican Gardens, he was aware of being followed by a bodyguard of his own.

Normally this part of the Vatican would have been busy with officials from the Curia arriving for work or moving between appointments; cars with their ‘SCV’ licence plates would be thrumming over the cobbles. But the area had been cleared for the duration of the Conclave. Even the Palazzo San Carlo, where the foolish Cardinal Tutino had created his vast apartment, looked abandoned. It was as if some terrible calamity had befallen the Church, wiping out all the religious and leaving no one alive except security men, swarming over the deserted city like black dung beetles. In the gardens they stood grouped behind the trees and scrutinised Lomeli as he passed. One patrolled the path with an Alsatian on a short leash, checking the flower beds for bombs.

On a whim, Lomeli turned off the road and climbed a flight of steps, past a fountain, to a lawn. He lifted the hem of his cassock to protect it from the damp. The grass was spongy beneath his feet, oozing moisture. From here he had a view across the trees to the low hills of Rome, grey in the pale November light. To think that whoever was elected Pope would never be able to wander around the city at will, could never browse in a bookstore or sit outside a café, but would remain a prisoner here! Even Ratzinger, who resigned, could not escape but ended his days cooped up in a converted
convent in the gardens, a ghostly presence. Lomeli prayed yet again that he might be spared such a fate.

Behind him a detonation of radio static disturbed his meditation. It was followed by an unintelligible electronic jabber. He muttered under his breath, ‘Oh, do go
away
!’

As he turned around, the security man stepped abruptly out of sight behind a statue of Apollo. Really, it was almost comical, this clumsy attempt at invisibility. He could see, looking down to the road, that several other cardinals had followed his example and had chosen to walk. Further back, alone, was Adeyemi. Lomeli descended the steps rapidly, hoping to avoid him, but the Nigerian quickened his pace and caught him up.

‘Good morning, Dean.’

‘Good morning, Joshua.’

They stood back to let one of the minibuses drive by, then walked on, past the western elevation of St Peter’s, towards the Apostolic Palace. Lomeli sensed that he was expected to speak first. But he had learnt long ago not to babble into a silence. He did not wish to refer to what he had seen, had no desire to be the keeper of anyone’s conscience except his own. Eventually it was Adeyemi, once they had acknowledged the salutes of the Swiss Guards at the entrance to the first courtyard, who was obliged to make the opening move. ‘There’s something I feel I have to tell you. You won’t think it improper, I hope?’

Lomeli said guardedly, ‘That would depend on what it is.’

Adeyemi pursed his lips and nodded, as if this confirmed something he’d already guessed. ‘I just want you to know that I very much agreed with what you said in your homily yesterday.’

Lomeli glanced at him in surprise. ‘I wasn’t expecting that!’

‘I hope that perhaps I am a subtler man than you may think. We are all tested in our faith, Dean. We all lapse. But the Christian faith
is above all a message of forgiveness. I believe that was the crux of what you were saying?’

‘Forgiveness, yes. But also tolerance.’

‘Exactly. Tolerance. I trust that when this election is over, your moderating voice will be heard in the very highest counsels of the Church. It certainly will be if I have anything to do with it.
The very highest counsels
,’ he repeated with heavy emphasis. ‘I hope you understand what I’m saying. Will you excuse me, Dean?’